[ale] WARNING - RANT Re: Comcast Caps Data at 250G/Month

[Michael B. Trausch]

Sorry this turned more rantish than I expected it would... just know
that before getting deep into the reading...

On Sat, Sep 06, 2008 at 08:12:01PM -0400, Jim Popovitch wrote:
> 2008/9/6 Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us>:
> > the assumption that all traffic that makes it in or out, including the
> > overhead of TCP/IP, and including things that are filtered by your
> > router/NAT (e.g., inbound packets that get dropped due to iptables
> > rules) count against your limit.
> 
> Seriously now, I can't imagine Comcast doing packet analysis,
> simultaneously, on all 13 million of it's customers.   Imagine the
> latency *that* would induce, or the computing power required to
> achieve such a thing.  Think it's easy?  Look no further than ALE to

They did reply that they just count everything, no matter what.  I
assume that that means that they just query the CM/CPE to see what the
byte counts are periodically, or they have the headend keep tallies for
each CPE MAC.  Can't imagine it'd be that hard if they're just pushing
numbers around to a database somewhere.

> > Does anyone know if all that stuff makes it through to the statistics
> > that are output by the "ifconfig" utility?  If a packet comes through
> Yes.

Sweet.  I was trying to figure out _where_ I would find the answer to
that, but I think it'd probably be in the kernel (haven't looked to see
where they actually come from yet, kid's got me going nuts here).

> They may not even be planning on counting the bytes.  I suspect that
> they will do nothing in October except perhaps monitor a few select
> customers/areas and only when a "target" exceeds 250G will they go
> after them and say "we don't want you any more".  As it is now,
> Comcast knows when a network segment is saturated (there are several
> media reports of how they have addressed saturated spots in the past)
> The new 250GB rule gives them teeth to use when they find the
> person(s) responsible for the saturation.

They could just lower their bitrate to 12kbps and nobody'd be able to
saturate it...  Of course, they wouldn't be able to transfer more than
250 GB/mo, either.

My take (though it would appear to be a rather unpopular one) is that
the company should have the hardware to support all its customers, or
stop getting new customers.  I didn't get an 8 Mbps connection to not use
it fully.  I think that they should instead spend their time going after
people that are actually violating the AUP that was agreed-to when
services were started.  That'd eliminate a lot of the people that are
*actually* abusing their connections, and then they wouldn't have to try
to make more people fit in the class of "abusers".  By their
up-and-coming new rules, though, I am not far outside of the category of
an abuser from their POV.  And in a month where I my family calls me a
lot to look at their computers over the Internet using remote
assistance/VNC/whatever, which uses a _lot_ of bandwidth?  I could
_easily_ go over.

   --- Mike

-- 
My sigfile ran away and is on hiatus.
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